Treasure of the Sierra Madre: Performance Per Dollar Sportbike Comparison

Right, we actually rode these six great motorcycles all over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but there’s no Humphrey Bogart film named that. And we didn’t really want to go to Mexico, where the real Sierra Madres are: Who needs to deal with banditos when we knew we’d have our hands full avoiding our home-grown federales? Like Bogey’s character in that classic film, we’re cheapskates in search of not just treasure, but real everyday value and usability—so we went for the base model of each bike whenever we could. Further, we included bikes of varying displacement to more deeply examine the performance-per-dollar equation.

It’s fun to ride around the racetrack, and it’s interesting to see which bike’s fastest and why. But we wanted to hit the road and see what these machines are like to live with in the real world. All are winners of recent comparisons or new models we were looking for an excuse to escape upon. And so, a mad dash across California’s great Central Valley and up into the crazy maze of roads in the Golden State’s historic and beautiful Gold Country: Jackson, Sonora, Angel’s Camp, Ahwahnee, Mariposa ... there’s no fun, hardly any old main streets with saloons and ice cream parlors, and barely any virginal smooth deserted pavement to be had up in there at all, so you should probably avoid the area.

THE SUPERBIKE CONTESTANTS: